Valve Announces Steam Greenlight: You Can Help Decide What Goes in The Steam Store

The merry band of merry makers merrily marched their way into yet another gaming field. Today they announce their community driven game approval process “Steam Greenlight”

Steam Greenlight, in a nutshell, is Valves method of streamlining the game approval process. It allows developers to submit their game with screenshots, details, specs and trailers and lets the Steam community vote on weather or not the game gets put into the store!

Now I personally think this is great, but I have two concerns with some of their requirements.

Are there any restrictions on what can be posted?

Your game must not contain offensive material or violate copyright or intellectual property rights.

Not contain offensive material? That is pretty vague. I feel that leaves a big window open for valve to say no to certain games and yet let others pass no problem. I am sure some people find a lot of the M rated games on Steam to be offensive. I would like more clarification on this. Safe to say that stuff like JFK: Reloaded will NOT make it onto the store.

What do I need in order to submit my game?

You’ll need a valid and non-limited Steam account (yes, that means you’ll need to own a game on Steam).

Interesting. What constitutes as “owning” a game. Do free to play games like TF2 Free or Fallen Earth count? Is this just a nice way of saying ” you need to grease our palms BEFORE you submit a game that we take a cut of.”.

Those two gripes aside, this is still PRETTY exciting! I can’t wait to see what comes of this.